Doctor, doctor, give me the news…

A reporter sends me a note about a hospital board in the state that happens to mention it held a vote by telephone to elect its new executive officer.  Is that legal under the sunshine law, asks the reporter?

This is a fairly basic issue.  The hospital board is a public governmental body. Therefore, anytime a quorum of its members “meet to discuss business” which includes taking a vote, it needs to post notice of its intent to meet, with all the normal requirements.  But votes taken by telephone raise an interesting question. Section 610.015 says that “When it is necessary to take votes by roll call in a meeting of the public governmental body, due to an emergency of the public body, with a quorum of the members of the public body physically present and in attendance and less than a quorum of the members of the public governmental body participating via telephone…, the nature of the emergency of the public body justifying the departure from the normal requirements shall be stated in the minutes.” But here, there is no evidence there was an emergency and the minutes don’t reflect any emergency. Plus, it appears ALL of the members were polled by telephone.  So it would appear that the pertinent clause is found in Section 610.010 (5), which defines a public meeting as including “a public vote of all or a majority of the members of a public governmental body, by electronic communication or any other means, conducted in lieu of holding a public meeting with the members of the public governmental body gathered at one location in order to conduct public business….” Using that clause, they could conduct a vote by telephone with no one present, but again, the requirements of notice of the meeting set out in Section 610.020 would have to have been done, including proper notice 24 hours in advance, indicating the mode of the meeting (ie: by telephone), advising the public of matters to be considered, and “the designated location where the public may observe and attend the meeting.”

If they failed to do that in this situation, they broke the law. And, one cannot help but wonder what the emergency was that this issue could not be taken up at a regular or special meeting of the body with the members present. What was the emergency that required doing this on the telephone?   Sometimes the emergency is that they don’t want the public to know what they did.  Many other times there is no emergency, there just is a lack of thinking on someone’s part.  Regardless of the reason, this particular hospital board needs a little Intensive Care when it comes to sunshine law instruction.